By accepting the photograph directly into the domain of pictorial art, not as an external memory prop for the painter's handmade re-creation of reality but as the actual base for the image on canvas, Warhol was able to grasp instantly a whole new visual and moral network of modern life that tells us not only about the way we can switch back and forth from artificial black and white on our TV sets but also about the way we could switch just as quickly from a movie commercial to footage of the Vietnam War. For Warhol, the journalistic medium of photography, already a counterfeit experience of the world out there, is doubly counterfeit in its translation to the realm of art. He takes us into an estheticized Plato's cave, where the 3-D facts outside, whether concerning the lives of a superstar or an anonymous suicide, are shadowy factions of equal import.

-- Robert Rosenblum in Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70's, 1979

In European countries of advanced capitalist culture, Warhol's work was adamantly embraced (at first in West Germany in particular, but subsequently also in France and Italy), as a kind of high culture version of the preceding and subsequent low culture cults of all things American. It seems that these cult forms celebrated with masochistic folly the subjection the massive destruction that the commodity production of late capitalism held in store for postwar European countries. Inevitably, Warhol's work acquired the suggestiveness of prophetic foresight. It cannot surprise us, therefore to find the key collectors of Warhol's work in Europe: first the West German scalp cosmetic industrialist Stroher followed by the chocolate tycoon Ludwig, and most recently by the Saatchi admen in London. It seems that they recognize their identity as well in Warhol's work and perceive their identity as culturally legitimized.

-- Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Andy Warhol's One-Dimensional Art, 1989

"Warhol: A Retrospective" which is on view at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, May 25-Aug. 18, 2002, is a riveting exhibition. Curated by Heiner Bastian for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the show appeared at Tate Modern before arriving at MOCA, its only North American venue.

Companion exhibitions in local galleries pepper the city. Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills is showing the extraordinary paintings Warhol made in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1980s. Grant Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills has Warhol's Polaroids. Kantor Gallery has an exhibition of Warhol's drawings, entitled "Icons," while Hamilton Selway and Ikon Fine Art have Warhol print exhibitions.

The Los Angeles art scene has embraced Warhol since the beginning. In 1962, Ferus Gallery (directed by Irving Blum) mounted the now-legendary first solo show of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings. The series of 32 paintings were purchased by Blum himself with Warhol's enthusiastic consent (for the princely sum of $1,000), and only recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a deal that was part sale, part donation. In 1963 Warhol showed the Elvis and Liz paintings at Ferus, and in 1970 had his first traveling retrospective at the Pasadena Museum, organized by curator Walter Hopps.

MoMA, anticipating the unveiling of its new Queens outpost, refused to lend the soup can series to the MOCA show, which the local press has considered a major slap in the face to the city. "The headline should read, MOMA to MOCA: Drop Dead!" wrote Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times.

Warhol's fascination with celebrity culture made his bond with Los Angeles a special one. Celebrities embraced him in return, as did collectors, dealers and artists. Ace Gallery had taken over representation of Warhol's work in the late '70s after Ferus Gallery closed and Irving Blum moved to New York, and at the gallery (where I was gallery assistant, my first art-world job), I was a witness to much of the pandemonium generated when Warhol came to town.

The atmosphere was electric, and lines for openings stretched blocks down Market Street in Venice. The after-opening parties at the home of collectors Marcia and Fred Weisman or Mr. Chow's restaurant had many of Andy's celebrity friends in attendance, happily mixing with the art crowd. I remember one emergency at the Weisman's, when the actor Ryan O'Neill was spotted with his elbow pressing into a Morris Louis painting. The unpleasant task fell to me to request that he remove his elbow, which he did with profuse apologies.

This present Warhol retrospective, however, is markedly different from one that might have been organized in the United States. Bastian's view of Warhol is notably European (many of the works are on loan from European collections), and it is a fascinating, rigorous and yet very dark take on the work.

Because Warhol was so prolific, Bastian said, he decided to concentrate on works of "quality," excluding from the exhibition many images that focus on celebrity culture. No commissioned portraits are in the exhibition at all. This is definitely not Warhol as flaneur of New York society via Studio 54 or Interview Magazine.

The exhibition focuses specifically on Warhol's evolution into a Pop artist from his early days as an art student and later as a commercial illustrator in New York. The show is particularly strong in early Pop paintings from the '60s and '70s, and then jumps to the paintings Warhol made just before his demise in 1987. After the Marilyn Monroe's 1962 suicide, death became the central theme of Warhol's work, according to Bastian. "Every day of his life, Warhol thought about death," Bastian said. "He followed the Marilyns with the Suicide Paintings, and for Warhol, the deaths of these anonymous individuals were as important as that of the superstar."

Whether or not Bastian is correct, the curatorial choices in this exhibition certainly make it seem that way. And the result is chilling.

The exhibition opens with a larger-than-life-size blowup of a photograph of a young Warhol from 1964, in Los Angeles shyly peering out from behind three stacks of Brillo Boxes. The photograph was taken during his second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery. The viewer then moves into a group of galleries displaying a wonderful selection of early drawings and collages, many of which are from private collections and have never before been seen in public. Warhol's acute dexterity as a draftsman is clear, as is his early interest in Pop subjects like the death of James Dean, and covers of tabloid magazines in general.

Other early drawings with political subjects, like Untitled (Huey Long) (1948) and Communist Speaker (1950), are reminiscent of works by Saul Steinberg or Ben Shahn. According to Bastian, Warhol at the time wanted to become known as the Matisse of his generation, and in fact he did become a successful commercial illustrator, doing commissions for the New York Times and other publications in addition to stores such as I Miller. His career path changed, of course, after he saw Jasper Johns' first exhibition of targets and flag paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958.

Warhol then began exploring the kind of Pop subjects that would make him famous. Several galleries are devoted to his works from 1960 that comprised his first paintings exhibition -- Advertisement, Little King, Before and After and Saturday's Popeye, all of which were displayed in 1961 in the windows of Bonwit Teller in New York. The installation then progresses onto the early paintings of diagrams of dance steps and Coca-Cola bottles.

The immense Paint-by-Numbers works, entitled Do It Yourself (Seascape) and Do It Yourself (Sailboat) are a revelation, and show Warhol's development into a fully formed Pop artist. The Paint-by-Numbers works are an ironic commentary on the Abstract Expressionist style that dominated the art world at the time. To say that these paintings were not particularly well received is an understatement.

Warhol himself describes the contrast in cultures:

The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two fisted types who'd grab each other and say things like "I'll knock your fucking teeth out" and "I'll steal your girl." In a way, Jackson Pollock had to die the way he did, crashing his car up . . . the toughness was part of the tradition, it went with their agonized, anguished art. They were always exploding and having fist fights about their work and their love lives. This went on all through the fifties when I was just new in town, doing whatever jobs I could get in advertising and spending my nights at home drawing to meet deadlines or going out with a few friends.

-- Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, 1980

We then have amazing examples of the great early Pop paintings -- Campbell's Soup, Liz as Cleopatra, Elvis. Quite a few Marilyn paintings are in the show as well, including the chilling Shot Marilyn, Blue, which is marked by a spot on Marilyn's forehead made by a stray bullet when Valerie Solanis visited the Warhol studio and started shooting. Another astonishing gallery features a large installation of Brillo Boxes and Tomato Soup Boxes from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum, donated to the museum by the artist at the time of his retrospective there in 1970.

At this point, the dark side puts the show into a hammer lock, with large electric chair paintings, car crashes, race riots, atom bomb paintings, a gangster funeral and an entire space devoted to the 12 Most Wanted Men series. Here are the Jackie paintings, as well as a painting of James Cagney as a gangster, plus paintings of guns and knives, skulls and the hammer and sickle.

Many self portraits depict Andy in dark glasses or in profile with shadows that also look quite austere. The most chilling paintings are the suicides. Particularly after Sept. 11, these images of people jumping out of tall buildings have an extra poignancy, as do several large paintings of the Statue of Liberty. Even the large flower paintings in this context look like they are from a cemetery.

One wall features portraits, and the choice of subjects is fascinating. We have Warhol's mother, Julia Warhola, and the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe, who both died prematurely. We have Warhol's dealers: Irving Blum, Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, Ivan Karp, Thomas Ammann, Alexander Iolas. We have his three closest celebrity friends: Dennis Hopper, Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli. And we have major collectors of his work: Peter Ludwig, Dominique de Menil and Eric Marx. One wonders how many viewers of the show will have any idea who these people are. In many ways, this wall is for the insiders.

The exhibition finishes with a huge gallery that includes paintings that Warhol made at the very end of his life -- Leonardo's Last Supper, plus other oversized works, including some shadows, portraits of the artist Joseph Beuys, a very large oxidation painting, a series of camouflage paintings and an immense Mao portrait. Warhol's sudden death was a shock. But considered in light of his final works, it didn't come without premonition.

1948The Copley GalleriesBeverly Hills, The Copley Galleries.To Be Continued Unnoticed. December 14, 1948 - January 9, 1949. Catalogue, 30,3 x 22,5 cm, 16 pp, Texts by Man Ray (To Be Continued Unnoticed and A Note on the Shakespearean Equations). Loose as issued within pink paper cpver sheet and heavy paper blue cover with a yellow back cover which continues losse onto the front in a triangular shape with a blue tip, Some Papers by Man Ray in connection with his exposition. Catalogue designed by Man Ray and Printed by Lynton R. kistler. One of 275 copies.

1959Institute of Contemporary ArtLondon, Institute of Contemporary Art.An Exhibition Retrospective and Prospective of the works of Man Ray. March 31-April 25, 1959. Catalogue, 23.9 x 15.4cm, 12 pp. Text An Autobiography and What i am by Man Ray.

1970Cordier & Ekstrom.New York, Cordier & Ekstrom.A Selection of Paintings. January 14 - February 7, 1970. Catalogue, 27,5 x 21,3 cm, 22 pp. A cut-out window on the front cover which allows "The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows" to show through from the inside. List of 19 Works

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is born on December 16, in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of three children of Edward Joseph Ruscha III (born, Billings, Missouri, 1891, died, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1959) and Dorothy Driscoll Ruscha (born, Chicago, Illinois, 1907, died, Oklahoma City, 1985). The father is of Bohemian/German descent, the mother of German/Irish descent. A sister, Shelby, is born in 1936 and a brother, Paul, in 1942. A half-sister, Mary Frances Ruscha, from a previous marriage, is born in 1921 and dies in 1995. Edward is given a strict Catholic upbringing attending church on Sundays and holidays throughout his youth.

1941

The family moves to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where Edward Ruscha, Sr. works as an auditor for Hartford Insurance Company.

1943

Ruscha enters the first grade at a Catholic school where lifelong friend and future artist Joe Goode also attends. Dorothy Ruscha cannot tolerate the repressive discipline of her children by the parochial school nuns and after a year has them transferred to Hawthorne Elementary School. She encourages her son's artistic inclinations.

1947

At Hawthorne, becomes friendly with future writer and musician Mason Williams and together they create a large mural of the Oklahoma Land Run for their 4th grade class. Ruscha's first exposure to art comes from a neighborhood friend, Bob Bonaparte, who is a cartoonist, and Ruscha begins drawing his own cartoons. He attributes the tactile quality of materials such as paper and Higgins India Ink as the catalyst for his interest in art.

1948

Ruscha enrolls in a painting class of Richard Goetz, an Oklahoma City portrait painter, and stays for about three months. Ruscha has commented that at the time he was still more interested in drawing cartoons though the smell of turpentine, oil paint and linseed oil struck him immediately. The work of cartoonists such as Basil Wolverton and Chester Gould as well as the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio remain his major influences during this period.

1949

At the age of twelve Ruscha works as a gofer for the Spike Jones Band. "I was running for things like a dozen eggs which Spike would then grab and throw at his musicians." Ruscha noted that the madcap style of Jones was the musical equivalent of his own burgeoning interest in art, particularly cartooning. Such humor-tantamount to a dadaist sensibility-left its mark on Ruscha's later style as when a foreign object would intrude on an established subject such as a floating olive in the sky above a Standard Station or the glass of milk at the end of the book Various Small Fires and Milk.

Ruscha makes his first trip to California on a family summer vacation visiting his maternal grandparents in Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

1952

Age fourteen, Ruscha hitchhikes with a friend through the south to Florida passing through towns whose names-Dublin, Sweetwater, Vicksburg-he places in paintings of 1959-61.

1953

Ruscha enters Classen High School in Oklahoma City enrolling in art classes along with friends Joe Goode and Jerry McMillan where he also becomes interested in typography and printing.

1955

Ruscha visits his sister Shelby now studying anthropology in Mexico City. It is his first time outside the United States and his first exposure to a cosmopolitan city. While there he meets the architect Luis Barragan whose development at El Pedregal makes a deep impression on him.

Joins U.S. Navy Reserve.

1956

Receives first prize in graphic design from the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.Graduates high school.Ruscha drives to California with Mason Williams to escape the provincialism of Oklahoma City, with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. He enters Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), a fine arts school, where he studies until 1960. He begins painting in the prevalent abstract expressionist style of de Kooning and Kline. The faculty at Chouinard at this time includes Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer both of whom have a strong influence on Ruscha. Other students include Joe Goode, Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes Jerry McMillan, Patrick Blackwell and Wally Batterton.

1957

Through magazine reproductions Ruscha encounters the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He is particularly moved by Johns' targets and flags and credits these works as giving him license to use the commercial and popular vernacular as fine art. It is at this point he abandons the idea of becoming a commercial artist and commits himself to painting.

1958

Ruscha and fellow Oklahomans Patrick Blackwell, Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan and Don Moore share a house at 1818 North New Hampshire Avenue in Hollywood where they set up a studio.He completes the eponymous painting Su, named after girlfriend Su Hall, which begins an artistic exploration of juxtaposed unrelated images-in this instance three gestural bands comprised of paint and fabric with a word that dominates the lower half of the picture.

He apprentices for six months with Saul Marks at the Plantin Press where he learns to hand set type. He becomes interested in book printing, layout and the tactile qualities of paper, developing in his words "a respect for pages".

1959

Ruscha frequents Los Angeles galleries such as Ferus and Dwan allowing him to see in person the new work coming out of New York and Europe.

He begins making small, representative works on paper such as the construction Dublin, in which unrelated elements are framed in one or more ink-drawn squares, developing the pictorial style of Su.

1960

Ruscha leaves Chouinard and begins working full time as a layout artist at the Carson-Roberts Advertising Agency in Los Angeles.

He sees Johns' sculptures of common objects and Kurt Schwitters collages for the first time in person in an exhibition organized by Walter Hopps at the Ferus Gallery.

1961

Ruscha travels extensively throughout Great Britain and Europe. Though he has little interest in the contemporary art he sees there, he is fascinated with several eccentric works such as Head of Mussolini by R.A. Bertelli, a round double-headed profile that can be viewed as such from any angle, and Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. In Paris he sees more work of Johns and Rauschenberg confirming the connections he feels to them. During his travels Ruscha photographs street life and makes numerous small paintings and collages on paper, some using words and street iconography; many in the pictorial style inaugurated with Dublin,.

Returning to the west coast he stops over in New York. At the Leo Castelli Gallery he is shown Roy Lichtenstein's painting Keds which greatly impresses him and is the first work of pop art he becomes aware of. At The Museum of Modern Art he views J.T. Baargeld's drawing Beetles whose diagrammatic oddness he relates to the sensibilities in his own work, manifesting itself in paintings such as Parking Lines.

Back in Los Angeles in the fall Ruscha shows Henry Hopkins, then a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, several paintings including Su and Sweetwater,. The latter is named after a town in Tennessee that Ruscha had traveled through in 1952. His largest work to date, it shows the influence of Johns' painting Tennyson. The painting is purchased by Hopkins and later inadvertently destroyed.

Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg) is completed this year, developed from the pictorial incongruities of works such as Dublin, and Sweetwater,, and is the first instance in the artist's work when a familiar object has been represented pictorially as damaged or destroyed. He begins a number of large paintings such as Boss in which single words are isolated against monochromatic fields nuanced by impasto.

Meets Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of the Ferus Gallery and develops friendships with a number of the gallery artists including John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman and Kenneth Price.

Ruscha resumes his position at Carson-Roberts but leaves shortly to devote himself exclusively to painting. He relocates his studio to 3327 Division Street in the Glassell Park district of Los Angeles and incorporates this address in several graphic works of the period.

1962

In September, Walter Hopps, now at the Pasadena Art Museum, includes Ruscha along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud and Joe Goode in the important survey "New Painting of Common Objects." It is the first exhibition of work soon to become known as "pop art."

Ruscha completes Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, the first of an intended series of subjects with dramatic architectural perspective that he projects to include Standard Station and Wonder Bread.

1963

In January, publishes the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations in an edition of 400 numbered copies under the imprint "A National Excelsior Publication," which is taken from the cover of a daybook uses for notes on his paintings. Using mass production printing techniques, it comprises 26 utilitarian black and white photographs of gas stations taken along Route 66 the year before. Significant for its detached and documentary style as a catalog of raw visual data it looks back to the photography of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, and forward to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. With its straightforward lettered covers reminiscent of his drawings, it has influence on artists of the late sixties such as Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner.

Ruscha relocates his studio to 2215 Echo Park Avenue in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles.

Completes the painting Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, an eclectic inventory of images, action and semiotic depiction of sound, which he considers to be one of his best works.

On May 20th Ruscha's first one-man show opens at the Ferus Gallery. Among the paintings exhibited are Annie and Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. Prices for the works range from $150 to $400.

Participates in two important museum shows in California: "Pop Art USA" organized by John Coplans for the Oakland Art Museum and "Six More," organized by Lawrence Alloway as a west coast companion to his "Six Painters and the Object", which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from the Guggenheim.

In October, Marcel Duchamp is given his first retrospective which is organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum. Ruscha meets Duchamp whose works such as The Chocolate Grinder have a tremendous impact on his own art.

Ruscha publishes his second book, Various Small Fires and Milk and designs the cover for Mason Williams' first book, Bicyclists Dismount.

He begins word drawings in graphite and does the lettering on a series of satirical drawings and pastels by John Altoon that are subsequently shown at the David Stuart Gallery.

The wry pictorial vandalism initiated in the 1961 painting Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg) is continued in several paintings of this period which depict words in the process of being damaged or set on fire. Ruscha has noted that many of the words used in his early works "represented things being broken, smashed (or) damaged."

He moves his studio to 3708 Eagle Rock Boulevard in the Glassell Park district.

On October 20th Ruscha's second one-man show opens at the Ferus Gallery. Among the works exhibited is Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas which is bought by Dennis Hopper, whose photograph Double Standard appears on the announcement. He receives his first significant national exposure from this show with a favorable review from Nancy Marmer in Artforum.

1965

Ruscha moves his studio to 1024 3/4 North Western Avenue in Hollywood and maintains this address for 20 years.

He participates in "Word and Image" organized by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Using the pseudonym "Eddie Russia" Ruscha began doing layouts commencing with the October issue for Artforum magazine whose editorial offices are above the Ferus Gallery. Though Artforum moves it's offices to New York in 1967, he continues in this capacity through the summer issue of 1969.

Publishes his third book, Some Los Angeles Apartments, and completes a series of ten enigmatic and idealized graphite drawings on the subject.

On November 16, Ruscha's third one-man show opens at Ferus, consisting of a series of bird and fish paintings. These works depict Field and Stream-type subjects seen in bizarre transformational or comical situations.

1966

In January, Ruscha is included in Los Angeles Now at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, his first European exhibition.

He creates his first "liquid word" painting, Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, the beginning of a series that continues through 1969. Numerous graphic works of the period also incorporate similar liquid lettering.

Using a split-fountain technique available to commercial printers, Ruscha creates his first screenprint, Standard Station, based on his earlier Standard Station paintings. The gradation of background color he introduces in this print becomes an idée fixe for the backgrounds of numerous paintings beginning in 1966. He receives a purchase award from the Los Angeles Printmaking Society and Lytton Savings and Loan for the Standard Station screenprint.

Publishes the book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a photographic panorama of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. It has a particular impact on architect Robert Venturi who creates a version for his book Learning From Las Vegas. The premise of a democratic registering of a place down to insignificant minutia is testament to Ruscha's ability to chronicle the factual as an artistic statement.

Ruscha designs the Mason Williams book The Night I Lost My Baby: A Las Vegas Vignette and the cover photograph, "Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed" for Artforum's issue on surrealism. His work appears in Lucy Lippard's survey, Pop Art.

Begins a series of handwriting drawings with graphite leading to his use of gunpowder as a medium in drawings the following year.

1967

Marries Danna Knego in Las Vegas in February. In the same month receives an award in painting from the National Council on the Arts.

Ruscha participates in several important exhibitions including "São Paulo 9," "United States of America/V Paris Biennale" and the "1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting" at the Whitney Museum.

Publishes Royal Road Test with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell which is cited as an influence by Robert Smithson, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles which Richard Kostelanetz calls a "reiterated, scathing critique of Los Angeles urban design and its bondage to the automobile."

Gunpowder Drawings, his first one-man show in New York, opens December 12 at the Alexander Iolas Gallery, a gallery primarily known for showing Max Ernst, René Magritte and other surrealists. He is recommended to Iolas by William Copley whose own work is shown at the gallery under the signature CPLY.

1968

Ruscha is part of a two-man show with Joe Goode at the Balboa Pavillion Gallery and has a solo show at the Irving Blum Gallery in Los Angeles where the large painting Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire is purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn.

He produces the eponymous Hollywood, a silkscreen print that becomes one of his most recognizable images and is the first of several versions of the famous landmark executed as paintings, drawings and other editions.

Publishes Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass and collaborates with Billy Al Bengston on Business Cards. The latter book is the artist's first publication under his imprint Heavy Industry Publications, taken from a 1962 painting. He designs a catalogue for Bengston's exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a cover made of sandpaper and pink flocking, illustrating Ruscha's continuing interest in incongruity and tactility.

Ruscha designs the album cover for Mason Williams' Music, and begins filming Williams at his Mulholland Drive house mixing a mint julep, and then with the camera over his shoulder, flipping through Ruscha's artist's books and reading aloud the captions. The film, in 16mm color, is left unfinished.

A son, Edward Joseph Ruscha V, is born December 14.

1969

Ruscha is awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a recipient of a two-month fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles where he creates twenty-two separate editions of prints. A one-man show of his graphics is subsequently held at the Irving Blum Gallery. He is included in the large survey exhibition, "Pop Art," held at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Publishes the photo-novel Crackers from a Mason Williams short story. It is designed with a wax paper-like dust jacket to simulate the wrapper of a box of saltines. He publishes the portfolio Stains which is his first use of unconventional mediums as well as an often humorous inventory of substances that create common household stains.

Seth Siegelaub organizes "One Month," an exhibition and catalogue of 31 artists who are invited to submit a work for a specific date in the month of March in what is to become the first exhibition of conceptual art. Ruscha is assigned the 27th and is one of seven artists who does not respond to the invitation. His non-reply is published as a blank page.

In September Ruscha is included in "557,087," an exhibition of conceptual art at the Seattle Art Museum organized by Lucy Lippard that travels in an augmented version to the Vancouver Art Gallery where it is titled "955,000."

In October contributes "Five 1955 Girlfriends" to the exhibition "Konzeption-Conception" at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen.

Visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1969-70, where he teaches drawing and printmaking.

1970

While in London Ruscha produces a portfolio of prints at Editions Alecto, News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, and Dues, for which he employs unusual materials such as food, flowers and axle grease in place of standard screenprint inks. During the next year he will begin using food and other organic substances in lieu of paint.

Ruscha produces the book Babycakes with Weights for inclusion in the Multiples portfolio Artists & Photographs and publishes the book Real Estate Opportunities. His "Five 1965 Girlfriends" is published in a special issue of Design Quarterly devoted to conceptual architecture and "Five 1955 Girlfriends" is reproduced for an article on conceptual art in Magazin Kunst .

One-man exhibitions of his liquid word paintings are held successively at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York and Paris. Photo based work is included in "Information" organized by Kynaston McShine at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, "18 Paris IV. 70" organized by Michel Claura and "Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects" organized by Donald Karshan for the New York Cultural Center.

Ruscha creates Chocolate Room, an installation for the 35th Venice Biennale, again using an unconventional medium-Nestle's chocolate paste-silk screened onto 360 sheets of paper and installed like shingles on the gallery walls. Chocolate Room is recreated in 1995 for conceptual art exhibition "Reconsidering the Object of Art" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and again in 1999 for the exhibition "Edward Ruscha Editions 1959-1999" at the Walker Art Center. In 2003 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchases the work.

No paintings are made during 1970. Ruscha tells the critic David Bourdon: "I can't bring myself to put paint on canvas? I find no message there anymore."

1971

Ruscha produces only five paintings during this year confining his artistic activity primarily to books, a film, printmaking, and creating drawings with organic substances.

He publishes A Few Palm Trees and Records. The latter book comes shrink-wrapped in the manner of an LP, testifying to Ruscha's continual attention to humorous detail. His book Dutch Details is published by the Octopus Foundation for Sonsbeek '71 with the majority of the print run mistakenly destroyed in a warehouse.

He begins shooting the16mm color film Premium based on his photo-novel Crackers published in 1969. The film which features Larry Bell, Leon Bing, Rudi Gernreich, and Tommy Smothers, is completed with the assistance of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Ruscha is included in exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Hayward Gallery, London.

The British architectural historian Reyner Banham publishes his study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which makes extensive use of Ruscha's photographs and art.

Ruscha receives a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

1972

"Edward Ruscha (Ed-werd Rew-shay) Young Artist," a major survey of drawings, prints, and books, is organized by Edward A. Foster at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota. Ruscha designs the accompanying catalog to resemble a "Big Little Book," a popular pulp format of the thirties and forties.

Ruscha publishes Colored People. Feeling he had exhausted the medium of the artist book, it would be his last for six years.

Insects a portfolio of screenprints, is published by Multiples, Inc. Ruscha designs the box with a plastic cover encapsulating dirt from the playground of his elementary school in Oklahoma City in order to give it the appearance of an ant farm.

He creates a cover for the April issue of ARTnews, "Art News, Sweet and Sour," an Arcimboldo-like composition of strawberries, peppers, olives, anchovies, pickles, and other foodstuffs arranged to spell out the magazine's name.

Ruscha produces a print for "Documenta 5," which is also used for the exhibition's poster and catalogue cover. The catalogue also reprints "Five 1955 Girlfriends" first published in 1969.

An exhibition of Ruscha's books is held in January at Ursula Wevers, Cologne. In February, Ruscha opens his first one-man exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, featuring his drawings. His relationship with Castelli will last until the latter's death in 1999. In April he shows drawings and the Stains portfolio at Galleria Françoise Lambert, Milan. He has a second exhibition later that month at Nigel Greenwood Inc., London, where he shows his first series of large paintings with single-word titled images, Faith, Mercy, Pity, Hope, Purity, three small paintings, Faith, Hope, and Pity, and three drawings titled "Mercy," reflecting his Catholic Church upbringing.

In September Ruscha exhibits a large group of stain paintings for his first show at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles. The exhibition inaugurates the gallery's new space on La Cienega Boulevard which was formerly occupied by Irving Blum. A contemporary review in the Los Angeles Times calls his art "roguish" while citing Ruscha's comic genius and his relevance as a precursor of conceptual art.

Ruscha's books are cited in Lucy Lippard's documentary survey of conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. Ruscha is also the subject of a lengthy interview with Willoughby Sharp in the short-lived but extremely influential journal Avalanche and is featured in Michael Blackwood's film documentary American Art in the Sixties.

1974

Ruscha's second one-man exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery opens March 30. Lawrence Alloway includes several Ruscha paintings in his "American Pop Art" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In October Ruscha shows eight stain paintings at Galleria Françoise Lambert, Milan.

Peter Plagens publishes Sunshine Muse, the first major survey of contemporary West Coast art. He writes: "When Ruscha's considerable wit creeps openly into his art, it's as though by accident, as when the bespectacled boy-genius drops his secret fluid and it poofs into a genii: the pointed 'dumbness,' the pseudo-naïve tours de force, the mock worship of California's earthly paradise. Ruscha is a Los Angeles phenomenon, precariously indigenous to a garden of vulgarity (as Warhol is ultimately alien to his) with only his own insouciance and facility to ward off the smothering flora."

Ruscha appears in the BBC documentary One Pair of Eyes: Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. He also receives the medal in graphics from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

1975

An exhibition, Edward Ruscha: Prints and Publications 1962-74, is sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain and travels to twelve council-member galleries throughout England.

Ruscha produces the photo-based series Tropical Fish at Gemini G.E.L. Like much of his work it documents the oddness of middle-American culture.

He completes the 16mm color film Miracle (also the title of a 1973 drawing and various later works) featuring Jim Ganzer and Michelle Phillips in a tongue-in-cheek tale of a mechanic who goes through a series of religious epiphanies while repairing a '65 Ford Mustang.

"Bless You," an original work, appears in the premiere issue of Vision, published by Crown Point Press in Oakland. Ruscha designs the "Devil or Angel" cover for the winter/spring issue of the journal Art-Rite.

1976

A "Matrix" exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings and books opens in February at the Wadsworth Atheneum. In March an exhibition of Ruscha's drawings, graphics, and books is held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In the same month three Ruscha paintings are included in "The Last Time I Saw Ferus," a retrospective homage to the Ferus Gallery, organized by Betty Turnbull for the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

"Edward Ruscha," a major survey of paintings, drawings, and prints organized by Linda Cathcart for the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, opens on June 8.

For the Venice Biennale in June, Ruscha creates an installation entitled Vanishing Cream consisting of the letters written in Vaseline petroleum jelly on a black wall. No other paintings are completed in 1976.Ruscha produces Various Cheeses, a series of six lithographs, at Gemini G.E.L.

Ruscha begins building a desert house near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern California.

1977

Ruscha creates the billboard painting, Back of Hollywood, as part of an artist project for the Eyes and Ears Foundation. Ruscha's work is a reverse image of his well-known 1968 print of the Hollywood sign. The billboard, installed in February in a parking lot on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, can only be read properly in the rear-view mirror of a traveling car.

He begins the series of Grand Horizontal paintings usually depicting words, phrases, and diagrams against blazing sunsets. This format, sometimes extending over thirteen feet in length, is reflective of the time Ruscha is spending in the desert, although the style and substance can be traced back to his print of the Hollywood sign.

In December Ruscha has two one-man exhibitions: "Recent Drawings" at the Fort Worth Art Museum and "Recent Paintings" at Ace Gallery in Venice.

1978

In September he has a major exhibition of his drawings and prints at the Auckland City Art Gallery in New Zealand. He attends the opening and afterward travels to Australia, Bali, Singapore, and the Philippines. Other exhibitions this year include those at Galerie Ricke in Cologne, Castelli Uptown in New York, Ace Gallery in Vancouver, and MTL Gallery in Brussels.

Ruscha collaborates with Lawrence Weiner on the book Hard Light.

He designs the catalogue Stella Since 1970 for the Fort Worth Art Museum.

Ruscha receives his second grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

1979

Ruscha has a one-man exhibition at InK, Halle für Internationale neue Kunst, Zurich where he shows three thirteen-foot paintings. One-man exhibitions of new work are also held at the Texas Gallery in Houston and Richard Hines Gallery in Seattle.

He participates in the documentary Seven Artists directed by Geoffrey Haydon for the BBC.

1980

"Edward Ruscha: Paintings and Drawings" opens in January at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. New paintings are seen in a series of exhibitions at Ace Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and Nigel Greenwood Inc.

1981

"Edward Ruscha: New Works," which includes seven Grand Horizontal paintings and a series of works on paper, opens at the Arco Center for Visual Art in Los Angeles in January. The works on paper, using carrot juice as a medium (Anybody's Tornado, Prune Drive, Honey?, Hold On for a Minute?, and Blazing Orifices), suggest the scatological and reinforce the comic nature of his work.

An exhibition of "D Drawings," a series of drawings that depict phrases as if interrupted by stuttering, opens at Castelli Gallery in February.

In June, a one-man exhibition of recent paintings is held at Ace Gallery in Vancouver.

In July, Ruscha is included in "Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties," organized by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In October Ruscha is included in an exhibition and catalogue of conceptual art "No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt" at Wesleyan University.

He appears in L.A. Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha, a documentary by Gary Conklin shot at the artist's studio and desert home.

1982

A major retrospective, "The Works of Edward Ruscha," is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and opens in March. The exhibition travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art and three other venues in the United States and Canada. Fellow artist Andy Warhol notes in his diary dated July 15: "It was a scorcher. Went to the Whitney Museum (admission $4). Saw the Ed Ruscha show, which was interesting."

"Drawings 1967-72" also opens in March at John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, followed by "New Paintings and Drawings" at Flow Ace Gallery in Los Angeles in April, "New Drawings" at Castelli Uptown in New York in June, and "Edward Ruscha 1960-1970" at Castelli/Feigen/Corcoran in New York in September.

Ruscha participates in "Documenta 7," which opens in June.

1983

"The Works of Edward Ruscha" opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 17 in the Ahmanson wing of the museum that Ruscha had depicted burning in his 1968 painting Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire. The exhibition is augmented with a number of recent paintings and drawings, resulting in the exhibition being divided into two "phases" with the second phase opening May 3.

Ruscha's glamorous "bad boy" persona and his Los Angeles County Museum retrospective are subjects for a People magazine profile in its May issue. In the article Henry Geldzahler is quoted as saying, "Conceptual, pop, surrealist, dada, neo-dada, earth art-all these are arguable elements of his style. Ruscha can be pinned down partially by any of these labels and yet he escapes all of them."

1984

An exhibition of new paintings opens in March at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

Ruscha accepts a small role in the film Choose Me directed by his friend Alan Rudolph. Ruscha was originally associated with a 1976 Rudolph production, Welcome to L.A., in which he played an artist. His performance and the credit titles he designed for the film were ultimately not used though he meets the actress and model Lauren Hutton on the set and becomes a close friend.

In July, his work appears in "The Automobile and Culture," curated by Walter Hopps. It is the inaugural exhibition of the Temporary Contemporary of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Ruscha's books are included in the traveling exhibition "From the Collection of Sol LeWitt" that opens in October.

In November, Ruscha's prints are included in the exhibition "Gemini G.E.L.: Art and Collaboration" that opens at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and travels to several other institutions over the next four years.

1985An exhibition of new paintings opens January 15 at the James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles.

Ruscha receives a commission to do the rotunda mural for the newly built Miami-Dade Public Library designed by Philip Johnson. To accomplish this, he moves into a large studio on Electric Avenue in Venice, California. The rotunda painting Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go and the lunette painting Whenever are completed in June. Ruscha and his assistant Greg Colson drive the paintings across country and install them in July, finishing the installation on the eve of the library's opening on July 19.

An important survey of early and new work opens in October at the Musée St. Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon.

The exhibition "Contemporary Prints, Contemporary Visions: Edward Ruscha, Prints 1979–1984" opens at the Fisher Gallery of the University of Southern California in November.

1986

Ruscha has exhibitions of new work in February at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, and, at the Texas Gallery in April.

In June, "4 x 6," a major exhibition of drawings with a catalogue and essay by Marianne Stockebrand, opens at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany.

In July, Ruscha begins his series of silhouette paintings. These paintings are among his largest to date, his new Venice studio allowing the possibility to work in larger sizes.

In September, Ruscha exhibits the silhouette paintings for the first time in a one-man show at the Fuller Goldeen Gallery, San Francisco. This is the first public indication of a new direction in Ruscha's work.

At the Tamarind Institute, Ruscha creates four lithographs in the style of the ongoing series of silhouette paintings.

In December, Ruscha is included in "Individuals," the first exhibition in the permanent new building of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

1987

Ruscha is the subject of a long commentary "Sweet Logos" in the January issue of Artforum by the poet and art critic Bill Berkson, who in reviewing the new silhouette paintings at Fuller Goldeen places these wordless paintings in the context of the literary: "I keep 'hearing' poetry in the room, for example John Ashbery's stellar title 'Into the Dusk-Charged Air.'"

Collector Frederick Weisman commissions Ruscha to paint the exterior of his private plane, a Lockheed JetStar. The plane is painted a midnight blue with clusters of galaxy stars relating it to a number of his constellation paintings of the early eighties.

Begun in 1978, artist Kent Twitchell completes a six-story, 11,000-square-foot mural, Ed Ruscha Monument, on a building at 1031 S. Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles, one of several portraits of artists and other well-known Los Angeles figures painted by Twitchell. The mural was preserved until 2006 when it was illegally painted over.

In April, Ruscha submits his proposal to do upwards of fifty archway lunette paintings for the Miami-Dade Public Library, and a final contract is signed in August. Having previously conceptualized the project by making studies on paper, the majority of the lunettes are painted within these several months. Ruscha uses scale models of the library to determine the placement of the lunette paintings throughout the library, although complexities with framing them prevent their installation until July 1989. Thirty-five of the lunette paintings are exhibited at Castelli's Greene Street gallery in November.

Two silhouette paintings from 1986 (The Uncertain Trail and Name, Address, Phone) are exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in April, marking the first international exposure to this new body of work.

Koen Brams/Dirk Pültau: Do you remember when you first saw paintings by René Magritte?

Jef Cornelis: In 1958, at the world exhibition. I was seventeen, then. Expo ’58 is a reference point for me, and not only for me, I think. But I have always had difficulty with French surrealism. Breton and his associates are not my cup of tea. And it was very difficult to separate Magritte from that lot. I needed time to be able to look at Magritte seriously. I never had any trouble with Giorgio De Chirico.

K.B./D.P.: When did you really learn to value Magritte’s work?

J.C.: I saw a terrible Magritte exhibition in 1980, at the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Palais des Beaux-Arts) in Brussels. That exhibition bothered me for a long time. It conjured up an image of Magritte that was completely wrong. I don’t think I really became interested in Magritte’s work until after reading Bedrieglijke gelijkenissen – de spiegel in het werk van Magritte (Deceptive Similarities: The Mirror in the Work of Magritte) by Bart Verschaffel, published in Archis magazine in 1986.

René Magritte (The Music Box)

K.B./D.P.: In 1994, together with Bart Verschaffel, you completed The Music Box, a film that also includes René Magritte’s work.

J.C.:The Music Box actually stemmed from Magritte’s work. In 1992, the Hayward Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Magritte’s work. I saw that exhibition together with Bart Verschaffel. That was the actual beginning of our preparations for The Music Box. I had received a small amount of money to go to London. We were able to work in London for two days – on something that would not be broadcast until 1994.

K.B./D.P.: Why did you invite Bart Verschaffel to visit the Magritte exhibition with you?

J.C.: After Container, the discussion programme on ‘civilization’, which I had made together with Bart Verschaffel and Lieven De Cauter, they were very badly treated by the VRT (Flemish Radio and Television). I thought that was really out of line. In 1990, Bart and I had completed our first monograph film, Dames en Heren Jan Fabre (Ladies and Gentlemen Jan Fabre). Bart had moreover since asked me to do a film for the Philosophy and Literature project to the Antwerp: Cultural Capital programme. That film, Voyage à Paris, (Journey to Paris) was partially realized with funding for Antwerp ‘93. They asked me to do an essay on Antwerp, and I left for Paris! Bart and I spent a lot of time together in those days.

K.B./D.P.: Where did your interest in seeing the Magritte show come from?

J.C.: We were out prospecting, in response to David Sylvester’s retrospective catalogue on Magritte. Sylvester worked on it from 1969 – two years after Magritte’s death – until 1993. It was completely financed by the Menil Foundation, including administrative expenses. That Magritte retrospective was my only reason to go to London, as a representative of a VRT art programme.

K.B./D.P.: Was Magritte’s catalogue raisonné the incentive?

J.C.: No, that was not yet on the market, but the monograph was. I know that for certain – as sure as I know that we were not allowed to film in the Hayward Gallery.

K.B./D.P.: Your trip to London was for which programme?

J.C.: I don’t remember. Some cultural programme, but I don’t recall which one. During that period, I did the most impossible assignments for the public network, projects that didn’t mention my name, luckily. I had to squeeze films like The Music Box in between all those assignments. We did see something there, in London, for certain. Bart Verschaffel and I spent two days there together, and then something started to develop. It grows, while you’re walking around. There were many elements in Magritte’s work that led us to Henri De Braekeleer. In November 1938, Magritte gave a lecture at the Royal Museum for the Fine Arts in Antwerp. Was it then that he first saw De Braekeleer’s work? At the end of the 19th century, James Ensor had given a lecture on De Braekeleer at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Ensor was very precise in his writing about De Braekeleer. What connects the work of these three artists with Jan Vercruysse is their interiors, indoor spaces.

K.B./D.P.: We found a document in your archives, dated October 10, 1992, written by Bart Verschaffel. It outlines the content of The Music Box. It is already clear there that the film would be dealing with domestic interiors, the bourgeois, and it mentions the four artists. “De Braekeleer, Ensor and Magritte’s ‘art inside the home’ not only shows the ambiguous place of art in the bourgeois way of life. It also shows related solutions to being an artist in the bourgeois period. None of them chooses to pose as a genius and/or a misunderstood genius – the Bohemian. They all wear a hat. All three of them play the piano. They exemplify a way of living as an artist in a (petit) bourgeois culture: by playing a double role, by spying and sending secret coded messages into the world, by being recognized and knighted. […] Vercruysse comes after this ‘Belgian solution’. He exemplifies a kind of ‘posthumous variation’. Because, who is the artist, if even the character of the bourgeois-artist disappears, and the artist no longer has a hat to wear?”

J.C.: Bart Verschaffel’s reflections on conventionality are partially based on the classes he taught at the University of Antwerp. It was then, in late 1992, early 1993, that I began negotiations with Charly Herscovici, who held the copyright on Magritte’s pictures.

K.B./D.P.: Why?

J.C.: I was nowhere without Herscovici. He had the rights.

K.B./D.P.: How did Herscovici get the copyrights?

J.C.: That’s a pedestrian story. Georgette, René Magritte’s wife, never got around to making a will. Dying didn’t exist for her. The Magrittes had no children. Gisèle Ollinger, head of Modern Art for the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts, arbitrated in order to get a judge to get something down on paper. Charly Herscovici, who never left Georgette’s side, was awarded several rights. When Georgette died in 1986, there was no notarized will, only a statement of intent, but that proved to be enough. Herscovici is the man who walked the dog, that’s all. But I have always been able to work well with him.

K.B./D.P.: You wanted to obtain the right from Herscovici to broadcast Magritte’s work?

J.C.: Exactly, otherwise the film would have been prohibitively expensive.

K.B./D.P.: How did you approach the matter?

J.C.: I contacted Charly Herscovici through Jan Martens of the Mercator Foundation. But I needed to have something to negotiate with, or it would never have worked.

K.B./D.P.: How do you mean?

J.C.: I proposed trying to put Magritte’s short films – I didn’t know in what state they were in – back together again. What had happened was that in October 1956, René Magritte bought a film camera. In the early years, in particular, he filmed a great deal on 8mm, in black-and-white. From the time he had a Super 8 camera, he again filmed a lot, this time in colour, until his death in 1967. In early December, 1965, Magritte asked Robert Rimbaert, who worked for the Francophone Belgian Radio and Television (RTBF), and Jean Raine, a French artist, to compile a montage of all the films. So, to do the compilation, they cut up all the reels. But it was never actually made into a film, and when René died two years later, Georgette rushed off to Jean Raine to pick up the chopped-up bits of film. They were put in a box, which did not turn up again until after Georgette’s death, at the public auction of the Magrittes’ estate in 1987. Gisèle Ollinger, as one of the few who knew about the box’s existence, managed to purchase the films for the Royal Museums – for a ridiculous price, 50,000 or 55,000 Belgian francs (€ 1,250-€ 1,360). David Sylvester was terribly frustrated. He wrote about the film segments, and there are a few stills reproduced in his book, but he didn’t realize that he had missed his chance until after the Royal Museums had made the purchase.

K.B./D.P.: How did you know about the existence of the films?

J.C.: A documentary had been made on the films back in 1976, financed by the Ministry of French Culture. It was a 25-minute montage by Catherine de Croës and Francis de Lulle. But it was Gisèle Ollinger who tipped me off. A portion of the films had ended up in the Film Museum because they wanted to restore them. Another portion ended up with the Royal Museums. When I learned that, I offered to reconstruct the films. I also went looking for Robert Rimbaert and found that he also had a few remnants of the Magritte films, a few envelopes with ten or fifteen frames. I immediately had a good starting point for negotiating with Charly Herscovici. It eventually resulted in a contract between the Flemish Radio and Television (VRT), the VAR (the advertising agency allied with the VRT) and Herscovici. The VRT had commercial rights for only five years, but that was not my concern. I just wanted to make The Music Box. Charly Herscovici helped pay for part of the production by temporarily releasing the rights. I was also the producer for the film, in fact, because who else in the public network would be interested in Magritte?

K.B./D.P.: Wasn’t Rik Sauwen the producer?

J.C.: I never saw Rik Sauwen.

K.B./D.P.: Rik Sauwen was at the press showing of Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag. He was interviewed. Quoting from a review in De Morgen, “Rik Sauwen is convinced that the BRTN’s high expectations for this documentary will succeed well outside Belgium.”

J.C.: Nothing was ever done with that. Sauwen did know the French-speaking milieu, but he never concerned himself with Magritte. It didn’t interest him.

K.B./D.P.: You said that you were not allowed in the Hayward Gallery. How did you get your hands on the pictures of Magritte’s work?

J.C.: Once again, via Jan Martens of the Mercator Foundation. The exhibition travelled from London to New York and from there on to Houston and Chicago. Jan Martens shepherded me into the Menil Foundation. Charly Herscovici agreed but didn’t help me.

K.B./D.P.: So you travelled to Houston?

J.C.: Yes, I had to move heaven and earth at the VRT, but finally I got the authorization. The Director of Television was dead against it. There was no money.

K.B./D.P.: Jan Ceuleers?

J.C.: Yes, I was negotiating with Jan Ceuleers all the way to the men’s restrooms at the VRT. I got four tickets. After all, I couldn’t film everything just from David Sylvester’s monograph, which had been published in association with the travelling exhibition. We were able to work on the paintings, one on one. It was great at the Menil Foundation. We were allowed to film on the days they were closed, Mondays, in the evenings and at night, two evenings and nights in total. The museum closed and we could work, without security. They even gave us permission to consult the archives. Bart was there too, although his Philosophy and Literature project for Antwerp 93 was taking a lot of criticism.

K.B./D.P.: How did you select the works you filmed in Houston?

J.C.: That was very simple: just get everything, inhale it all, as quickly as possible. Paul De Cock was cameraman. The exhibition was very complete, from the period around 1926 up to and including the end of the story. We began in the first gallery and kept going until the last room. The people at the Menil Foundation were very confident about their documentation. Who else – besides them – had a serious archive? No change was forthcoming either, until later, after the Irène Hamoir collection was donated to the Belgian Royal Museums. Today, the Royal Museums have the world’s largest Magritte collection.

K.B./D.P.: If you did so much filming in Houston, then only a fraction of it was used in The Music Box?

J.C.: That’s true, but I recuperated a lot of material a few years later in Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag.

K.B./D.P.: How did you focus a camera on a Magritte painting?

J.C.: I aimed on what you did not see at first sight.

K.B./D.P.: Were you looking for specific things within that framework?

J.C.: I did something I never used to do – I do it a lot with Magritte: there is quite a bit of camera movement. We really did make some choices.

K.B./D.P.: You filmed the paintings in an empty space. There are a few shots where you back away. The viewer sees the empty room – the intimacy of the empty room, something Magritte himself painted so often. You can show a painting with or without a framework. There are several shots in which you move in, towards the painting. First you see the painting with a frame, then the camera zooms in until you see the painting without the frame.

J.C.: Then the picture is no longer an object on display. We made use of those different possibilities.

Henri De Braekeleer (The Music Box)

K.B./D.P.: In The Music Box, Magritte’s work is linked to that of De Braekeleer…

J.C.: …no, no, it’s not about ‘linking’. If you bring some of Magritte’s pictures together, they seem to fit together, and that is also the case with De Braekeleer. This is something we literally said to each other at a certain point when we were talking about it: that some paintings mesh with each other, and that you can go back and separate the different works, but you can never again shake off the connections, the series. That not only applies to series’ within one oeuvre, but also for series’ drawn from several oeuvres.

K.B./D.P.: So you wanted to create a series in The Music Box.

J.C.: Yes, one that stays with you.

K.B./D.P.: As you had done in the exhibition you did at Witte de With in Rotterdam, in February, 1995?

J.C.: That series in the first room, with two Bruce Naumans, Ensor’s picture of a skeleton painting, the tuba by Vercruysse, and the 1928 Magritte, L’Inondation - a vulva like no other…

K.B./D.P.: Let’s talk about the ‘components’ of The Music Box, about De Braekeleer’s oeuvre.

J.C.: Bart Verschaffel and I have always talked about De Braekeleer. It is something we have in common. Back in 1957, I went to a Rik Wouters exhibition at the Royal Museum of Art in Antwerp – alone, not with my parents. I was sixteen years old and returned home with a catalogue. I was actually interested in other things, not the work of Rik Wouters. I saw De Braekeleer in that museum! I got stuck on the De Braekeleer paintings, and that has always stayed with me. It was reinforced by Maurice Gilliams’s essay Inleiding tot de idee Henri De Braekeleer(Introduction to the Idea Henri De Braekeleer). Now I think it’s a sentimental text. (…) Bart Verschaffel has a better opinion of that essay. I think Bart has everything that has ever been written about De Braekeleer. It is a passion we share. When you hear that De Braekeleer quoted Baudelaire out loud and was declared insane by the people around him…. I don’t think Gilliams was really interested in Baudelaire.

K.B./D.P.: What in particular drew you to the work of De Braekeleer?

J.C.: There is something very thought through in De Braekeleer’s paintings – they are strong images. I think Vercruysse has also produced strong images. I differentiate between strong images and paintings. Ensor made good paintings, but not great, powerful images. Or he did only during a very short period, until 1909, the period when he drew on his family situation: the absent father figure, and that closed environment where he is stuck between his aunt and his mother, who run the household. There are personal dramas everywhere. With Magritte, there is that whole family context, his mother committing suicide. De Braekeleer, too, has a problem; he can’t get his background out of his system.

K.B./D.P.: In your Ensor selection, it is conspicuous that a lot of paintings have paintings within the paintings: a painting in the picture, a painting on an easel in a room. This draws Ensor’s work closer to Magritte. The Music Box only includes Ensor’s interiors.

J.C.: That is true, and it is no coincidence. I don’t think that Ensor was a great image-maker. May I say that? Magritte, in the beginning, was very concerned with putting something together, with composing something. They are strong images, in the most modern sense of the word. Magritte’s oeuvre – it has a number of points that I can live with. I have tried to get as close to it as possible. It is a good thing I’m interested in painting! I am not interested in stills: a film still is false. A close-up of a painting, or a part of a painting - now that’s something. Balthus also produced some fantastic images. I’d give the entire French cinema for fifteen paintings by Balthus.

K.B./D.P.: If you say that De Braekeleer is an image-maker and Ensor a maker of good paintings, what consequences does that have for the way you film?

J.C.: I knew when I was filming Ensor’s work that I should go no further, that I should not do anything more than reproduce the image as well as possible. I think I was actually only after the pictures of Ensor’s funeral – that coffin being carried into the church.

K.B./D.P.: And Vercruysse? Was that specifically your contribution?

J.C.: Yes, I think I kept on insisting on it. I looked at that work for a very long time. In 1990, I also made a film about Vercruysse’s work, and I interviewed him myself.

K.B./D.P.: The title of the film is the title of a short Laurel & Hardy film.

J.C.: Yes, The Music Box was Bart Verschaffel’s idea. It is the film in which a woman asks Laurel & Hardy to deliver a birthday present for her husband – a piano – to her home, and the husband proceeds to hack the piano to bits with an axe. It was fortunate that I was able to get a copy of the Laurel & Hardy film, free of copyright. If we hadn’t had The Music Box, our film would not have happened. It was something we could work with: The Music Box as the box in which the instrument is kept. What’s that thing – the art - kept hidden in there? It’s too bad it was an upright piano, because artists had grand pianos – the Vercruysse grand pianos. But it is not only a box where a musical instrument is kept. It is also a coffin. And the Flemish artists have always worked with masks. De Braekeleer did as well. When we see all those guitars in De Braekeleer, then we are turned into dreamers imagining female figures everywhere. De Braekeleer’s language led us to the other artists, because they had probably all seen that, too.

K.B./D.P.: Is the specific metaphor of The Music Box also related to the Vercruysse work, the music box, because a music box literally appears in The Music Box?

J.C.: The Vercruysse music box has followed us all, from the moment it was made. At least, it followed me and a number of other people. I have always understood Vercruysse in relation to the work of Ensor, Magritte and De Braekeleer. Let me be perfectly clear: in my opinion, Broodthaers’ work does not fit into this, although I have nothing against Broodthaers.

K.B./D.P.: What was the scenario of The Music Box?

J.C.: There was not actually a lot on paper. Bart Verschaffel and I had many long discussions. At a certain point, our conversations crystallized into a central idea for the film. For example, the idea of the Laurel & Hardy film, and that then generated other ideas in turn. At a certain point, we decided to put our ideas to a few outsiders: Geert Bekaert, Dirk Lauwaert and my wife, Christine Kloeck. We organized two recording sessions, on two different days, one with Dirk Lauwaert and my wife, and one with Geert Bekaert and my wife. Bart Verschaffel explained our ideas to them. Bart has an incredible didactic ability, something I don’t have. Apart from the footage we had of the work of Magritte and Vercruysse, we had no film material for the other artists, Ensor and De Braekeleer.

K.B./D.P.: It comes across as a little contrived, explaining the thesis of the film to Dirk Lauwaert, your wife and Geert Bekaert.

J.C.: Bart and I were actually very uncomfortable sitting there. We thought we had strong hypotheses, but we were not completely sure of ourselves. But you think those people are just sitting there for the show?

K.B./D.P.: Yes, it looks as though the guests are there just to keep Bart Verschaffel’s discourse going. Dirk Lauwaert says nothing, Geert Bekaert intervenes once and your wife plays the interested bystander.

J.C.: We didn’t rehearse that! Moreover, we had seriously considered that Lauwaert and Bekaert would shoot down our arguments. That would have been interesting. In fact, those conversations were a kind of dress rehearsal to composing the film. We edited the two sessions together. I was mostly concerned with the direction of the facial expressions.

K.B./D.P.: Where did those shoots actually take place?

J.C.: I had access to a studio that was usually empty. The decor was really cheap. I am always interested in putting people in a closed space and filming from a height. The viewer sees the material lying on the table, as the Laurel & Hardy film runs in a loop. That set-up is no accident. I wanted it clear that no one could leave. There is a scaffold surrounding the table. You would have had to crawl underneath it to get out of there.

K.B./D.P.: You didn’t start shooting Ensor and De Braekeleer’s work until after those sessions?

J.C.: No, we had already done the filming of Magritte’s work and I was already certain that I had enough material to make a second film. I just had to find some editing time. That was never a given. But I first needed to find the money to finish The Music Box. It all came about in fits and starts. I’ve always had to organize my work that way. I partially gleaned the Vercruysse shots from the film that I had made with and about him in 1990, for his exhibition at Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. In addition, I had also done some shooting at Castello di Rivoli, when Vercruysse exhibited there in 1992. He showed Tombeaux there that had not been in the Eindhoven exhibition.

K.B./D.P.: Did you travel to Turin especially for The Music Box?

J.C.: I don’t think so. I think I first used those shots for some art programme. And I filmed the Vercruysse grand pianos at the home of the collectors, Anton & Annick Herbert. That’s how The Music Box came about. I did some shooting the De Braekeleer and Ensor work with a different cameraman, at the museums in Antwerp, Brussels, Doornik and Ostend, as well as several private collections. No effort was too much to film all those paintings. It wasn’t until during the shoots that we really had a good insight into De Braekeleer’s hidden elements.

K.B./D.P.: Do you mean that literally, that you were still making discoveries when you were filming the paintings?

J.C.: De Braekeleer - that was a revelation during the filming. Which says how inattentively we had both been looking at it until then. Bart Verschaffel was there a few times during the takes - not in Antwerp, but in Brussels. By focusing the camera on the material for a long time, we made some phenomenal discoveries, like the woman with the earring in De man bij het venster (The Man at the Window). There is a woman with an earring worked into the reflection of the male figure by the window. Those two messages - some say we’re imagining it. But from now on, if I see a picture by De Braekeleer, I think there will be something to see in it that I hadn’t seen before.

K.B./D.P.: Verschaffels’ argument during the two sessions, about the secretive side of De Braekeleer, then, was confirmed in a rather spectacular way. But the viewer does not know that you did not yet have all the ‘proof’ of that. That ‘evidence’ certainly illustrates Verschaffel’s argument, to be sure, but in the film, they are inevitably without comment, because Verschaffel’s argument was already on tape. For that reason, it seems that it was not Verschaffel who developed the discourse, but the camera. It is a visual discourse. The camera seems to move, as it were, in order to find something out. The focus is on one single part of the painting, then the camera is raised, and that creates the meaning.

J.C.: That is correct.

K.B./D.P.: For that reason, it is an especially complex film. Far more is shown than is explained. It is only later, in his article, “Het heimelijke in het werk van Henri De Braekeleer” (Hidden Elements in the Work of Henri De Braekeleer), published in De Witte Raaf, that Verschaffel explicitly brought together all of his insights, including ‘discoveries with the camera’, into the secretive elements in De Braekeleer’s work.

J.C.: It was very interesting for him to collaborate on film projects like these. He has, by the way, always reported the genesis of those ideas very accurately. Bart could never have written that essay on De Braekeleer without the help of the camera.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag

K.B./D.P.: For the other two Magritte films, Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag and Een Weekend met Meneer Magritte, it was again Bart Verschaffel who did the research.

J.C.: That’s right, and once again, it resulted in another essay.

K.B./D.P.: Was any filming done for Les Vacances?

J.C.: No, everything was already available: the films from Houston, the catalogue raisonné by David Sylvester and Magritte’s own short films. There was enough material to do a film on Magritte’s entire oeuvre, about Magritte the person, and about the way he perceived his role as an artist. First, the film segments of Magritte’s films had to be reconstructed.

K.B./D.P.: How did you go about doing that?

J.C.: I had access to AVID editing technology. All the pieces were put onto a hard drive. Then I started rearranging the puzzle. The segments had been very clumsily cut, but that was more an advantage than a disadvantage. Each splice was in fact unique. Someone had kept trying to cut right on the frame line, but most of the time, they were off to one side. If you have a good AVID technician, you can try out 20 or 30 possibilities in less than twenty minutes.

K.B./D.P.: How much material was there in all?

J.C.: One hundred eighty-seven minutes and thirty-five seconds. I tried to reconstruct each reel – a reel is, I think, three minutes. Besides, I had an idea about the number of reels – from the papers of Robert Rimbaert and Jean Raine, who had cut everything up. Based on what I saw and based on what I knew from the correspondence, as well as the sloppy way the films were cut, in many cases I could make out which piece belonged to which. I also had fairly good blueprints of the houses where Magritte had lived. And I had seen the houses, in order to better assess the images. But the correspondence was the biggest help. Why did he go to Ostend? Incidentally, as soon as he had purchased the camera, the Magrittes went to visit Irène Hamoir and Louis Scutenaire in Ostend, and they visited the Ensor house! In the letters, you find out that the Magrittes went to visit Georgette’s mother’s grave, on the first or second of November, somewhere in Charleroi. His correspondence is almost 17th- or 18th-century. He corresponded with a lot of people. Anyway, we managed to reconstruct about 40 short films. They are not all exactly three minutes. Actually, that work should be done over again. You could make them really beautiful if you wanted to. There was documentation, too.

K.B./D.P.: Documentation?

J.C.: About 700 pages were produced. Each image has been indexed. There are copies at the VRT and the Film Museum. Eva Binnemans, my assistant, followed up on all that. It was time for me to quit, I can say that.

K.B./D.P.: Why?

J.C.: I had never done a reconstruction like that before and I wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. My biggest frustration was that I could not upgrade the physical quality of the material. It was in poor condition. We had to be satisfied that there was anything left of it at all. Films were probably also destroyed at the Magrittes’, because of the reels being badly spooled. The films he had purchased, of Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Picratt and Max Lindner, looked better than what he himself had shot. They were no doubt less ‘used’.

K.B./D.P.: Irène Hamoir’s accounts are incorporated in Les Vacances.

J.C.: Irène Hamoir was a key figure for me. Obviously, she is a prominent presence in a large number of the films. And, Irène – Sirène – was one of Magritte’s lovers. She was the most authoritative witness. I approached her in 1994, the year before she died. I wanted to go through those 187 minutes with her and ask her very specific questions.

K.B./D.P.: Did you go through the full 187 minutes with Irène Hamoir?

J.C.: Yes, and I stopped every time I wanted to ask her something. We started in the afternoon and finished around seven o’clock in the evening. I wanted to know who appeared in the films, where they were filmed, and so on. It was probably one of the last times that she appeared in public. I don’t think I made any mistakes. Although, someone doing further research would probably discover mistakes, but I was financing my own film.

K.B./D.P.: Who interviewed her, you or Bart Verschaffel?

J.C.: I did it myself. I couldn’t afford to lose any time.

K.B./D.P.: What did Hamoir say about the films?

J.C.: Hamoir relativized everything. She said Magritte only did it to amuse himself. I think he went to a lot of trouble to amuse himself. We didn’t develop much of a conversation, in fact, although I must say that Hamoir was still incredibly clear-headed.

K.B./D.P.: Irène Hamoir received an honorarium for Les Vacances.

J.C.: Really?

K.B./D.P.: Yes.

J.C.: That was nice of me. I spent a day with her. I no doubt thought it only logical to compensate her.

K.B./D.P.: Suzi Gablik also received an honorarium.

J.C.: Suzi Gablik? I’d be amazed at that. I did call her several times, because I thought she was an important witness. She not only wrote an important essay about Magritte, but she stayed with the Magrittes for a time and took part in several of the short films. But if I so much as mentioned a few names of others involved on the phone, the conversation was over.

K.B./D.P.: She is thanked in the credits.

J.C.: Yes. I wanted to meet her, but she didn’t want to, it’s that simple. And no honorarium was paid. Suzi Gablik was the first person who seriously analyzed Magritte’s work. She was very important for the reception of Magritte’s work in England and the U.S., even though David Sylvester pushed everyone aside after that. She needed visual material for her book and she approached Charly Herscovici, but Charly wanted money. That put her off. She wanted nothing more to do with Belgium. That was all too obvious.

K.B./D.P.: When did you begin editing Les Vacances?

J.C.: I had no money, no money for the editing. I had to go around to the various departments, begging. I went looking for scheduling gaps. For that reason, I often did the editing in the summer. Institutes like public networks come to a standstill in the summer, just like hospitals. Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag was truly created on the editing table. We had everything at our disposal, so it was just down to editing it into a comprehensive presentation. That’s something I haven’t experienced very often during my career.

K.B./D.P.: Was Bart Verschaffel present at the editing of Les Vacances?

J.C.: Yes, the whole time, but not with The Music Box. He was the only one who set foot in the kitchen. The others didn’t want to. We spent an enormous amount of time at the editing table, together with an excellent editor, Danny Staes. We made the film at the editing table. Literally. There was no script.

K.B./D.P.:Les Vacances is a very complex film. There are pictures of the paintings, fragments from the short, staged films, and fragments from the films of the paintings, and the voice-over is sometimes a commentary, but at other times there are quotations from letters; the soundtrack is very much a presence. In the different ways that voice, sound and image are used, the multi-layering of Les Vacances outdoes all other films.

J.C.: That is very true.

K.B./D.P.: What were you focusing on?

J.C.: On the period from 1926 to 1930, until the elements appeared, the famous eight elements (fire, forest, plank, skin, bell, cloud, façade, paper clipping) that we had seen at the big exhibition. What was not much represented in that exhibition was his période vache. We filmed those paintings from good reproductions. We could not get access to the paintings because at the time, Irène Hamoir had most of them. I think the période vache is just as powerful as Duchamp’s objets trouvés.

K.B./D.P.: When you say that there was no script and that the film was made at the editing table, that means that you were making associations, the whole time you were sitting there.

J.C.: Yes, with the paintings, the books, the films, an so on.

K.B./D.P.: In Les Vacances, for instance, you first show In memoriam Mark Sennett, a painting in which a wardrobe is portrayed: one door is open and you see the dress of a woman with ‘real’ breasts. You follow that painting with a fragment from a film in which Magritte opens another wardrobe and sees a tuba, which he places on a table. Subsequently, you show L’Histoire centrale, a painting of a female figure whose face is completely covered by a cloth. There is a tuba and a suitcase beside the woman. In your film, we only get to see the woman and the tuba. Then another fragment from a film follows, in which two people are kissing, while their heads are completely covered with a cloth. Did you check on when those paintings were made, and when the films were made, or were these just visual associations?

J.C.: I don’t recall doing any systematic checking.

K.B./D.P.: So it was nothing more than visual rhyming?

J.C.: Yes. Magritte bought his camera in 1956. By then he had already finished all those paintings.

K.B./D.P.: The films always came after the paintings? Are you certain of that?

J.C.: Except when he filmed in the garden. Then it was almost simultaneous. He painted, then placed the work in the garden and filmed it.

K.B./D.P.: You could say that in staging the films, Magritte parodied his own work?

J.C.: Why not?

K.B./D.P.: How were the subtitles determined? ‘Without life, no art’, ‘René Magritte’, and then the address in Schaarbeek.

J.C.: That was his address, with his telephone number. That phone number is typical of me: you can call it if you like. Someone becomes a very tangible presence.

K.B./D.P.:Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag was broadcast in 1995, on March 28th.

J.C.: Yes, but the film was first shown in a cinema, on a big screen.

K.B./D.P.: What was the reason for that?

J.C.: My madness, no doubt. I thought it was necessary, for myself, but also for George De Decker and Ward Weis, who had made the soundtrack, and also for Walter De Niel, who had done the sound mixing. The VRT had a fantastic mobile studio. It had very expensive equipment that, most of the time, never got used. The soundtrack was made in that van, and the van was driven to the cinema so that everything could be shown and heard under the best possible circumstances. The VRT allocated money for it and BARCO lent us the additional material: a large format beamer, in a real cinema.

Een Weekend met Mijnheer Magritte

K.B./D.P.:The Music Box was broadcast in 1994, Les Vacances de Monsieur Mag in 1995. After that, you did yet a third film on Magritte: Een Weekend met Mijnheer Magritte (A Weekend with Mr. Magritte), broadcast in 1997. For you, what did Een Weekend met Mijnheer Magritte add to Les Vacances?

J.C.: I had the time. I had time to do the editing, which is very rare in a television studio, and I was able to prolong my career. I hadn’t been sacked quite yet, but if they had found a way to throw me out, they would not have hesitated to do so. I managed to carry on for another three years, for myself. It was a strange process.

K.B./D.P.: But if you were shooting Les Vacances in 1994, why do you want to make another film, with just Magritte’s films, without all the image associations?

J.C.: I had sunk my teeth into Magritte, because I did not think that Magritte’s relationship to the cinema was not such an innocent phenomenon. I believe that it is a part of his oeuvre. Irène Hamoir trivialized it, but even so, every Saturday she played her part in scenarios that gave totally different meanings to some of his paintings. I did not want people saying it was nothing.

K.B./D.P.: It is rather odd that in your first film you made obvious connections between his paintings and his films, while that aspect is totally absent in Een Weekend.

J.C.: I had already invested so much time in that project. I wanted something of it to last. But as always, I had to go looking for money to complete the film.

K.B./D.P.:Een Weekend is divided into two parts, Saturday and Sunday.

J.C.: The film sessions took place at the Magrittes’, on Saturdays. We are virtually certain that they were usually between 8:00 and 10:00 pm. The Saturday evenings were primarily for drinking and having fun. Was that Magritte’s idea of a social life, or was he putting his guests on? At 10:00 pm, everyone was mercilessly shown the door. There are stories about arguments if people didn’t leave fast enough. The Saturday section of the film shows fourteen fragments from his staged films. In the Sunday part, there are eighteen fragments from the biographical films, such as the trip to Ostend and the shots of the Ensor house. Ostend is a classic in Belgian art: everybody’s been there. There is a world of difference between Magritte and Ensor, but the first thing Magritte does when he has a camera is swing by the Ensor house. In both sections, Saturday and Sunday, the chronology has been respected. I thought that was very important.

K.B./D.P.: The only editing is the selection from the films.

J.C.: Yes, we had to keep that.

K.B./D.P.: The tuba recurs in both sections of the film. The tuba is the connecting element. Although Sunday is actually biographical, the tuba does appear in it.

J.C.: It was self-evident.

K.B./D.P.: With that tuba, you make an important statement. The tuba appears in one of Magritte’s staged films, in colour (Saturday), and it also turns up in a colour film shot in the garden (Sunday).

J.C.: I didn’t make those films, did I?

K.B./D.P.: No, but you did make the selection.

J.C.: The tuba appears in the film with Suzi Gablik. Magritte mostly did the camerawork himself, except in that long film with Gablik.

K.B./D.P.: How did Gablik end up with Magritte?

J.C.: Suzi Gablik found Magritte through Alexander Iolas. She stayed with the Magrittes for eight months, in the last house they lived in. All of Magritte’s old cronies had their eyes on her. Scutenaire was even in love with Gablik. For that reason, Irène Hamoir did not take kindly to her at all. Alexander Iolas was Magritte’s gallerist. I knew Iolas from the 1960s, thanks to Martial Raysse’s success with him. When I was filming in Greece in the early 1980s, I filmed his villa in Athens, designed by Dimitri Pikionis. There were artworks in the villa from the entire generation of artists that Iolas had sold, including Magritte. Because of Iolas, Magritte started painting in larger format, because the Americans wanted bigger sizes.

K.B./D.P.: Does a character like Iolas fascinate you?

J.C.: Yes, figures like that come out of nowhere. Without Iolas, Magritte’s career would have taken quite a different course.

K.B./D.P.: We can’t read that fascination in a film like one about Greece.

J.C.: It is of no interest to know about me. I think I need to hide that, because otherwise…. That is actually what all those guys do, actually. The ambiguous secret – I didn’t invent that!

K.B./D.P.: Back to Suzi Gablik and the tuba. Is the tuba something that you only noticed when you saw the films, or had you already picked that up from the paintings?

J.C.: From the paintings! That one painting, L’Histoire centrale, was included in the travelling exhibition, and it was already very significant for us, even then.

K.B./D.P.: In the film, the tuba is pulled out from under a skirt. That is of course the strongest image…

J.C.: You do know who was lifting up her skirt? That was Irène Hamoir. I talked to her about it. I tried to get her to talk about it, but it didn’t work, she fell silent. There must have been other material. There had to be.

K.B./D.P.: Does that material still exist?

J.C.: I doubt it. There are moments when you see that things are approaching the edge. It was right at the edge. He also took a few photographs that…. There are enough indications of that. Scutenaire once wrote about a “une histoire érotico-fantastico-iconoclaste”.

K.B./D.P.: What happened to that material?

J.C.: I have no idea, and I did not have the resources to go looking, either. I asked Charly Herscovici about it a couple of times, too, but I didn’t get any answer. Did Georgette burn it? Alone, or with Charly? It is certain that pieces are missing, and that strange things happened at the Magritte residence, but don’t ask me precisely what was filmed. I couldn’t speak to Hamoir about it.

K.B./D.P.: Hamoir primarily underplayed Magritte’s films?

J.C.: Yes, to her, it was just amusement. I see it differently. I very much appreciated those little films, especially in their attempts to reproduce the paintings. Taking a painting outside, every time, putting it on a chair and filming it - that’s what you have to do. I also believe that he revealed something of himself in the films, when he took a certain angle and showed something specific, or when he also acted, himself, playing both sides of the fence. There are directors who simply cannot resist getting in front of the camera, and that happened with him too. Those various roles – that was what I was thinking about. Perhaps it has something to do with something I have missed in my own life. I have never done anything intimate with a camera. It has always remained abstract. Am I making myself clear? Because Magritte was not a professional, those films are not taken seriously. The films are ignored, even by the Royal Museums in Brussels, which organized the big Magritte retrospective a few years ago. The films are not taken seriously in Belgium and that will stay that way, until it really becomes important.